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Destination Tomorrow - DT16 - Space Food Preparation

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Subido el 28 de mayo de 2007 por EducaMadrid

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Second segment of episode 16 that describes the process of preparing food for space, how astronauts prepare and eat food. The Space Food Preparation segment also describes how food is stored and the characteristics of food that appeal to astronauts. The Space Food Preparation segments ends with a Did You Know? Segment about the R R S Discovery.

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To help find new ways to make food in space more acceptable, NASA scientists began experimenting 00:00:00
with new types of food, new packaging, and new processing procedures. 00:00:05
To help us understand how food is now prepared and packaged for spaceflight, Tonya St. Romaine 00:00:09
spoke with Connie Erkley at Space Food Systems Laboratory at NASA Johnson Space Center. 00:00:14
Food plays a very important role in everyone's life. 00:00:24
We all have a comfort food or a favorite food that helps us get through those stressful 00:00:28
days. 00:00:32
But many of us also have foods that we find objectionable, for cultural reasons or simply 00:00:33
for the way it tastes. 00:00:39
This is true for astronauts in space as well as for us down here on Earth. 00:00:41
But in the confines of a spacecraft, your food choices are somewhat limited. 00:00:45
Because food is much more than just sustenance, affecting our mental happiness as well as 00:00:50
our physical abilities, NASA researchers have worked hard to prepare meals that astronauts 00:00:55
look forward to eating. 00:00:59
But space is a unique environment, so the food not only has to taste good, it also has 00:01:01
to have a long shelf life, it has to be able to be stowed effectively, and it has to be 00:01:06
able to withstand the rigors of space. 00:01:11
To help us understand exactly what goes into preparing food for space, I spoke with Connie 00:01:14
Eartley in the Space Food Systems Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. 00:01:19
Food for the astronauts has changed extensively over the years. 00:01:25
The days of mercury are certainly gone, cubes and tubes are no more. 00:01:28
Astronauts eat a food system that's very similar to what they eat here on Earth. 00:01:34
It's very familiar, all kinds of food items. 00:01:39
They can eat steak, shrimp cocktail, chocolate pudding cake, you name it, they eat all kinds 00:01:43
of food. 00:01:49
Here we have peanut cubes and sugar cookie cubes, how do you eat these? 00:01:50
Well again, these are from very early in the space program, and so these, literally, these 00:01:55
packages would be cut open, they would put these cubes in their mouth and consume them. 00:02:00
These are one of the not so appetizing things, and this is how far our food has advanced. 00:02:04
The only thing that they have now that they just cut open and pop in their mouth would 00:02:09
be something like candy coated peanuts or cookies or something like that. 00:02:12
The rest of these food items, rehydratables have to be rehydrated and heated before consumed. 00:02:16
These types of food items, they also are heated before they are consumed, and they're just 00:02:24
simply, pouches are cut open with a pair of scissors and the astronauts eat right out 00:02:29
of it with regular utensils, so it's just like eating at home. 00:02:34
Providing an acceptable food system is very important to us. 00:02:38
Food fills a psychological need for the astronauts, so we take our jobs very seriously when we 00:02:41
work to provide nutritious and tasty foods for the astronauts. 00:02:46
So visual aspects of food is very important, as is taste. 00:02:51
Food has to taste and look good for someone to want to eat it, so we take that very seriously. 00:02:57
We've changed that from the beginning days, from tubes and cubes, and we provide things 00:03:01
from tomatoes and eggplant and butterscotch pudding, all the way to peanut butter and 00:03:07
cinnamon rolls. 00:03:12
When developing, we don't just have something that meets the astronaut's nutritional needs, 00:03:13
it has to look good and taste good, and when they open a pouch, you want them to smell, 00:03:17
oh, that smells just like meatloaf and that takes me home. 00:03:21
Connie, how many items are in the menu? 00:03:24
We have over 250 different food items on our food list, a huge variety of foods. 00:03:27
All of these foods are shelf-stable food items. 00:03:34
They do not need to be refrigerated or frozen. 00:03:36
That is the driving factor in our food system. 00:03:39
We have free-stripe foods. 00:03:42
Free-stripe foods make up a big portion of the food system, specifically on the space 00:03:44
shuttle. 00:03:49
They are foods that have had the moisture removed, and before they can be consumed, 00:03:50
they have to add water, add it back to them, and the labels on the food give the astronauts 00:03:53
instructions on how to rehydrate the food properly. 00:03:57
This is our most favorite dish, shrimp cocktail. 00:04:01
We add three ounces of cold water from the galley, and you can see the little rotary 00:04:04
dial where you select the amount of water, and you see two switches. 00:04:09
The yellow is the hot and the blue is the cold. 00:04:13
Then you kind of squish the water into the shrimps and wait about ten minutes for the 00:04:15
shrimp to totally rehydrate, and it actually comes together and forms a nice sauce. 00:04:21
Now, on Earth, you might eat with a knife, spoon, and fork, and fork in space, scissors 00:04:27
and a spoon is all you need, and we use the scissors to open up the food tray, and one 00:04:33
of the features of all of our food is it has a lot of heavy sauce, which kind of holds 00:04:39
it together, and then we just use our spoon, and because of the sauce, it doesn't float 00:04:43
away. 00:04:49
The surface tension holds it there. 00:04:50
It's real nice. 00:04:51
Okay, so we have a little Italian vegetables here, but we've got chicken. 00:04:52
How do you not need to refrigerate the chicken salad? 00:04:56
Because the moisture has been removed in the food, that's what renders it shelf-stable. 00:05:01
There is nothing there that would spoil. 00:05:06
When you add water to these, do they grow, do the sizes grow like a sponge? 00:05:10
Slightly. 00:05:15
There is a vacuum on all of these packages, so all the oxygen has been removed from the 00:05:16
package, and that also helps extend its shelf life. 00:05:21
Water is introduced through this septum, and it does fill out this pouch. 00:05:25
This actual portion won't expand. 00:05:29
The pouch will expand a little bit once that moisture is introduced, but this is the actual 00:05:32
size. 00:05:38
Freeze-drying removes the water, but doesn't disrupt the cellular integrity of the food, 00:05:39
so you can add water back, and you get exactly what you started with. 00:05:44
This isn't a condensed version. 00:05:47
It's just literally just missing the water. 00:05:49
And the portion sizes are fairly small. 00:05:52
Why do you keep them that way? 00:05:54
Things do look small, and that is one of the questions that we get often, but when you're 00:05:55
actually weighing food and giving what is a recommended serving size, they tend to 00:05:58
be smaller than what the average person considers. 00:06:04
So you can't do the biggie size in space. 00:06:06
No supersize. 00:06:09
That's right. 00:06:10
And so there are no leftovers. 00:06:11
That's very important. 00:06:12
What they do have in a serving size, they do need to consume it, because what they don't 00:06:14
consume out of a package, that becomes trash, and that becomes something that has to be 00:06:18
maintained, and not to mention, it could smell. 00:06:23
If you don't eat an entire, say you're eating tuna fish, and you don't eat an entire package 00:06:26
of tuna fish, that's a smell you're going to have to live with for a long time. 00:06:29
So it's to your advantage to consume the entire contents of the package. 00:06:33
And this is interesting. 00:06:37
There's a cinnamon roll in here. 00:06:38
There is a cinnamon roll in here. 00:06:41
This is an extended shelf life bread product. 00:06:42
It also lasts at room temperature for a couple of years, which is very different from most 00:06:45
of the bread products you can think of, because bread molds in a couple of weeks. 00:06:50
This has been formulated so that the water activity, which is the amount of free moisture 00:06:55
that would be available to microbes if they were present, this has been lowered so much 00:07:00
that if there was anything present, it couldn't spoil the product. 00:07:04
This is one of the older, you were saying, it's come a long way. 00:07:08
There aren't cans as much anymore, is that correct? 00:07:11
That's right. 00:07:14
We have moved away from the can. 00:07:15
We have very few items that are in cans right now. 00:07:18
Off the top of my head, I can think of about three or four. 00:07:19
We have moved to the pouch. 00:07:22
These foods are thermally processed. 00:07:25
It's another word for canned food, or we also call it retorting. 00:07:28
And the food inside of this container has been heat treated so that the food is what 00:07:34
is called commercially sterile. 00:07:39
We use this pouch for several reasons. 00:07:42
This is a technology from the military. 00:07:44
This is what looks like their meal-ready-to-eat packages. 00:07:47
These are our formulations in these packages. 00:07:51
And the pouch is great because, one, when processing, it's not so rigid like this can. 00:07:54
And in order to heat treat this can, you might end up over-processing the food item. 00:08:01
In this pouch, which is nice and flat and uniform, products don't get over-processed, 00:08:06
so you end up with a high-quality food item. 00:08:10
Also, what's really nice is they stow very efficiently. 00:08:13
This pouch takes up a lot less room than a bulky, rigid can, so we can stow more food 00:08:16
items much more efficiently and use our container space as best that we can. 00:08:22
And then last, it's a means of trash management. 00:08:28
A can, again, is very bulky. 00:08:31
You have an empty can to deal with in the trash. 00:08:33
It takes up a lot of space. 00:08:35
This just folds completely flat, and you can store a lot of empty pouches in a lot less 00:08:37
space than you can store bulky cans. 00:08:43
The drinks. 00:08:45
All of our beverages are powdered. 00:08:46
All of them come in this type of package. 00:08:49
They also have a label, which tells them the name of the product, plus how much moisture 00:08:52
needs to be added to the product before consuming. 00:08:57
What's unique about this is you have to have a special straw to consume this beverage. 00:09:00
And this straw is inserted into this package. 00:09:05
It actually opens up a septum, which it opens up a one-way valve. 00:09:08
So in microgravity, liquid's wanting to come right out of the straw, so we have a clamp 00:09:12
on the straw to keep the liquid in. 00:09:17
And then when the astronauts are ready to consume, they release the clamp, the liquid 00:09:19
flows into their mouth, they have to clamp it off, and then they have to remember that 00:09:23
above the clamp, they need to get that liquid out, too, or else they've got some free liquid 00:09:26
floating around. 00:09:31
And the astronauts are encouraged to keep their fluid intake up. 00:09:32
It's very easy to forget to drink in space, and so they're encouraged to do that often, 00:09:36
and they have plenty of drinks to keep them very well hydrated. 00:09:39
We also offer every combination of coffee and tea that you could imagine, so they have 00:09:42
a wide selection to choose from. 00:09:48
But I say before you get the M&Ms, they have to eat their spinach. 00:09:50
In a perfect world, you would. 00:09:55
We do plan minis for all of the astronauts so that their nutritional needs are met, but 00:09:57
when it comes down to it, when they get ready to eat in space, they eat what they want to 00:10:03
eat. 00:10:07
We'll find out why all the food flown into space has special cooking instructions, but 00:10:08
first, did you know that the Space Shuttle Discovery took its name from Captain Robert 00:10:13
Scott's famous Antarctic Exploration Vessel? 00:10:17
The RRS Discovery was built in 1901, designed specifically for an extended Antarctic expedition. 00:10:20
Because the vessel would be in Antarctica for over two years, it was required to carry 00:10:27
enough food and equipment to support the 40-man crew until she could be resupplied. 00:10:32
With about 35,000 pounds of preserved meats and another 42,000 pounds of flour, the Discovery 00:10:36
left for Antarctica on August 6th, 1901. 00:10:42
Although there was a large supply of food aboard, the crew would also hunt seals and 00:10:47
penguins, which helped prevent a common ailment of the time, scurvy. 00:10:51
The Discovery returned from Antarctica on September 10th, 1904, and in 1986 was opened 00:10:56
to the public as a museum ship. 00:11:02
It is now permanently moored in Dundee, Scotland. 00:11:04
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Idioma/s:
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Autor/es:
NASA LaRC Office of Education
Subido por:
EducaMadrid
Licencia:
Reconocimiento - No comercial - Sin obra derivada
Visualizaciones:
575
Fecha:
28 de mayo de 2007 - 17:05
Visibilidad:
Público
Enlace Relacionado:
NASAs center for distance learning
Duración:
11′ 12″
Relación de aspecto:
4:3 Hasta 2009 fue el estándar utilizado en la televisión PAL; muchas pantallas de ordenador y televisores usan este estándar, erróneamente llamado cuadrado, cuando en la realidad es rectangular o wide.
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